"Today we have a new gnostic awakening that is taking place all over the Christian Church! It is being called various names such as "revival”, "renewal”, even "transformation”, "the power of God” but it is far removed from Scripture and no different than the Gnostic doctrine once practiced early on. We need to comprehend the extent of this gnostic influence today: Seeing it for what it is will help you withstand the deception that is now taking place. But you must see it for what it is or you will be carried away by it. I do not see any more middle ground on this issue, it will increase even more."
The Gnostic Jesus, a Gnostic Christianity
letusreason.org/Latrain18.htm
-----
The American Religion
book by Harold Bloom
Gnosticism: Bloom thinks religion in America is more Gnostic than Christian.
"The American Religion…masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.”
"The American Jesus was born at Cane Ridge.”
"According to Bloom, the American Religion began on August 6, 1801, when 25,000 frontier-people of many denominations showed up at Cane Ridge, Kentucky for a huge revival meeting. Many went non-linear. Bloom: "Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists at once became American Religionists, rapt by ecstasy.” And: "The drunk, sexually aroused communicants at Cane Ridge, like their drugged and aroused Woodstockian descendants a century and a half later, participated in a kind of orgiastic individualism, in which all the holy rolling was the outward mark of an inward grace that traumatically put away frontier loneliness and instead put on the doctrine of experience that exalted such loneliness into being-alone-with-Jesus.”
What are the characteristics of the American Religion? The belief that:
1) What is best and oldest in us antecedes the Creation. "The God of the American religion is an experiential God, so radically within our own being as to become a virtual identity with what is most authentic (oldest and best) in the self.” And: "God is within.” And: "We are mortal gods, destined to find ourselves again a world as yet undiscovered.”
2) What makes us free is not belief but knowledge. "Awareness, centered on the self, is faith for an American.”
3) Freedom is solitary. "The believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and otherness devalued.” And: "The freedom assured by the American Religion…is a solitude in which the inner loneliness is at home with an outer loneliness.”
4) Once redeemed by Christ, man returns to innocence. "Only the American Religion promises what Freud tells us we cannot have: ‘an improved infancy.’”
5) The Bible is the Word of God. "The American Religion, unlike Judaism and Christianity, is actually biblical.”
The American Jesus.
"The American Christ is more American than he is Christ.” And: ”Jesus…is a nineteenth- or twentieth-century American, whose principal difference from other Americans is that he already has risen from the dead. Having mastered this knowledge, he teaches it to whom he will.” And: "The American Jesus is the resurrected friend, walking and talking one-on-one with the repentant sinner. And this Jesus comes to one of his own free will, and not the sinner’s; he chooses one.”
source: goodreads
-----
Bloom is a Jew, not a Christian, however:
... the children of this world are in their generation wiser
than the children of light. Luke 16:8
these 2 articles/books together is very meaty stuff you
most likely will not appreciate if you never thought about
the fact that America's religious contributions to the modern
world are very different than anything that is regarded as
orthodoxy for the first 1800-1900 years of Christianity.
Then again nothing is really new under the sun, it just
got remixed and dished up again under new labels.
The American version however is the endtimes version
of it, and much more intoxicating than the original. It went
around the world and has polluted original Christianity to
such a high degree that no society or church is not affected
by it, so I would slightly disagree with the opening statement
of "no different than Gnostic doctrine once practiced early on".
It is different in a way that originally cults and the church
were separated, at least initially, today they almost merged
completely, in front of our eyes.
When God's word was preached at Cane Ridge, many people
were barking like dogs and jerking their bodies uncontrollably.
"The American Religion, unlike Judaism and Christianity,
is actually biblical.” -- Harold Bloom, on what it means
for Americans that "The Bible is the Word of God"
Few people are really on the narrow way in any strict or
straight is the gate sense, it's mostly a huge compromise
with darkness posing as light. Of course we are told to come
out of her, my people, and salvation is offered to anyone
that repents. Today nobody knows anymore of what they
should repent of - and why. That is the real and serious
problem of our time. There is not really any cure for any
patient that insists that there is nothing wrong with them.
Yet, it's still time to repent of the American religion,
Seek the LORD while he may be found...
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts:
and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him;
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.